You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

I really do think coding using AI tools is a bit faster, at least it seems that way to me. As most of the morning but lengthy work can be done faster by AI.

But I am also pretty sure it's VERY easy to rapidly incur technical debt, especially if you are telling AI to review its own work. Yeah it will do some stuff but who is to say post review fixes it's really better?

More than ever I think the right approach to coding with AI is to build up carefully crafted frameworks that are solid (maybe use AI to help but review and tests very carefully) then allow AI to build on top of solid fundamental structures that you know are solid, and do not let the AI modify those - maybe let it ask for feature requests.

as long as the topic is not controversial and political.

The problem is that the Wiki mods are VERY VERY biased. Not just a little. I have run into this personally just trying to make very simple edits. They would not accept simple facts that I had backup sources for.

This was just for movie credits for an actress that at some point had turned conservative...

So for anything political, Wikipide will be factually wrong, sometimes (or often) egregiously so.

But that's ok if it's only for political content right???

But there's the trouble you see. It affects what is political TO THEM in ways you cannot comprehend, so ANY page might be touched by the corruption of the Wikipedia moderator biases. I wouldn't think a simply actress filmography would be affected yet it was. No visitor other than that page would ever know it was inaccurate or incomplete.

So you can trust absolutely nothing from Wikipedia without extensive checking of what facts they refuse to list. Which makes the entire body of work garbage - I have not used it for years now.

A more interesting question I think is, does anyone own this AI actress?

That is to say - if a company took her likeness, and used other AI to make porn - could "her" agent sue them?

Or in other words, is a purely AI generated likeness even copyrightable, when technically no human made it?

I don't give a shit if some Russian/Kazakh/Malaysian bot farmer wants to take over my phone.

So you do no banking on your phone? Unlikely.

For the 99% of people that do in fact use a phone for banking, protection from lower level criminals is invaluable. For most people there is real financial loss possible from a phone being taken over, at the very least to monitor banking access mechanisms.

Unless Trump was the one who personally built all these models that companies are trying to replace workers with, I don't think he's much of the reason there are so many more people out of work.

ChatGPT making up things and incorrectly following policy would merely be in line with the current editorial pool, who ignores policy when it suits them and fabricates material if an article has any kind of political content.

What everyone does not seem to realize, is that MNAY of the choices we are making to "save the climate" are equally stupid. They are just less obviously stupid.

Having a wimpy direct path that just goes from Airport - Downtown - Convention center is perfect for a huge number of cities.

So many places it can be really rough to get from the airport to the downtown area any time around rush hour (which in a lot of cities is around a 3-4 hour window).

Some places with rail kind of have this - like the train that goes from Midway into Chicago. But even THAT has a lot of stops and is not great for travelers, even if it's nice for residents.

I also have to say that a system where you are riding in smaller vehicles I am a big fan of because it eliminates the problem where homeless people are just handing up on the train which create danger, nasty messes, and of course awful smells. Though awful smells is not restricted to the homeless of course, that can be any other passengers also so nice to be removed from them too.

If the moon is split in two and we are living through Thundarr the Barbarian I can first shot at wooing the princess!

Being a huge fan of the original cartoons, I was really sad to hear the whole story of Coyote vs Acme being canned. So while I am not sure how good the actual movie is, I'm really glad it gets a chance to exist and I will probably see it just to support the pushback effort.

There's not much other stuff I am really waiting for but am cautiously hopeful about Tron, and actually will try to see Alien: Earth which looks like more fun than a lot of SF Horror has been recently. But I am keeping expectations low for both.